This Week in jQuery, vol. 8

Another week, another collection of links to some of the most interesting and exciting new jQuery happenings around the web.

If you have ever used a regular expression tool to highlight character matches in real time, then you’ll jump for joy when I tell you about the Interactive jQuery selector tester written by Samuli KÃ¤rkkÃ¤inen. You enter a selector expression, and in real time you get to see the elements in the DOM structure that have been selected. I can see this being very handy for complex expressions or for optimizing expressions down to the simplest solution.

Plugin Spotlight/Updates

Pulled from my own personal archives. I bring you $.event.special.hover which is an alternative to Brain Cherne’s popular hoverIntent plugin. You may or may not have missed this plugin, but regardless, it’s certainly worth a first look, or second.

jQuery Gossip/Rumor Mill

It’s possible that you might be seeing several team members, if not John Resig himself, talking at the up and coming devdays. And the really juicy part is they might be wearing a DEVO red energy dome.

jQuery Quote of the Week

“You can save a tremendous amount of time and effort by using the browser-independent framework that JQuery has spent untold man-hours testing, debugging, and proving in the field. While there’s nothing wrong with writing JavaScript, why not speed your development time by writing to the library instead? As I’ve always said, don’t reinvent the wheel, unless you plan on learning more about wheels. ” – Jeff Atwood

It appears as though the news section on the front page of the jquery site never updates. It would be great to be able to see if there are any new blog posts from the front page rather than having to go to the blog.